96 Comments

Hello, I am also really looking forward to an in-depth review of the Nokia Lumia 920. From the looks of it it seems like the next big thing but I would really like get some more information about it. The only question that remains for me is if I should take the jump to Windows Phone. Pretty please, review the Nokia when you get the chance!Reply

I have to write something now...every time I talk to a Microsoft representative I always asked them "when are you opening up native development?"...now that I'm tickled pink to see Windows NT on these phones, I have to put up or shut up lol.Reply

I don't want to rely solely on streaming from the cloud. Data is precious and this ain't a game of roulette.

I want reasonable quantities of onboard NAND and an mSD slot.

My Note 2 has 80GB total = 16GB onboard plus mSD 64GB.

Even my Zune has 80GB, albeit via a mechanical HDD.

My N900 has 64GB total = 32GB onboard plus mSD 32GB.

My X523 feature phone has 32GB via mSD.

Even so, 80GB of storage still seems too small. Especially if you are going to carry a good-sized collection of loss-less music and some videos, along with documents, etc.

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I would really like to replace my carry-everyday feature phone with a Windows Phone.

The HTC 8X is beautiful, but 2 things are missing now from all Windows Phones: The iPhone 5 has the best holdability and screen size, so a high-end 4" Windows Phone would be great. Also, Samsung Android devices provide mSD slots, which are crucial to expanding local storage.

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As for what I've already got:

The N900 is weak on software, OS functionality, and ease of use. Windows Phone would fix that.

Unlike most users who are buying the Note 2 as a phone, I actually bought the Note 2 to use as a tablet. It's to replace my Kindle Fire. I found the Kindle Fire to be too limited on functionality, and it has no GPS or telephony radios.

The Note 2 is impractical to wear, but I got it for its incredible functionality and backpackability.

Windows Phone OEMs should target getting the functionality of the Note 2 squeezed into a 4" Windows Phone with dual-micro-SIMs, 64GB NAND onboard, and an mSDXC slot, so you can crank the storage up to 128GB or better.

exactly. I'd be cool be cool with cloud storage if there were no data caps. But there ARE. And if you're constantly streaming downloading from the cloud your already mediocre battery life will tank. That's crap.

Lumina 920 has twice the storage, and the Samsung ATIV has an sd slot.

It's unfortunate because on the looks and weight category I think HTC is the winner.Reply

I can't understand why people keep saying this crap. It's a rectangle with colors, just the like Lumia, but otherwise the design language is quite unique and no one (who isn't brain dead) should have any trouble telling the 8X and the Lumia apart, especially in-person.Reply

I disagree that Microsoft knows how to implement good thread scheduler. After so many years of potential time to replicate Linux/Unix/Solaris multithreading on Windows servers it is still much worse.Reply

Hi Brian,Thanks for the run down of your few days with WP8.Couple things I would love to hear about before the physical launch date!How about the interface software? The biggest issue I have with WP7 has been the lack of sync support with outlook.Also, Zune sucks. Zune software is buggy and it has abysmal file support.

And the Marketplace. What about the Marketplace confusion? Are we still supposed to jump around between xbox and live and zune accounts?

There are a lot of convoluted issues in the WP OS that need to be revised for WP8.Reply

...has forgotten its identity. The elements that gave Metro character have been removed, such as ellipses and arrows. The same applies to Windows RT/8...it's increasingly all squares and increasingly less Metro.

I feel like Microsoft has lost sight of what the Metro design language was about: simplicity, efficiency, and intuitiveness. With Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, they've lost the "intuitive" part.Reply

Glad not to be the only one who feels that way. As an established iPhone user (3G, 4, 5) I've always found the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro to be elegant and distinctive. That distinction seems to be much diminished with WP8, although it appears that its functionality remains.

But functionality isn't something that the casual buyer, which is to say most buyers, can readily appreciate when they're looking at options in the phone store.Reply

Too true. Newcomers will pick up that fancy new HTC 8X and not have any idea that there are more applications to the right because there is no arrow to bounce around and tell them there is more. I'm sure they'll discover it just by playing around, but to me that isn't enough. You shouldn't have to discover by accident how a UI works.

As a result of the above grievances, I'm not sure I want to upgrade my WP7.5 device to WP7.8 when released into the wild. Sure, I'll be missing out on some functionality, but from what I've seen the added features of 7.8 won't be enough to make up for the loss in character for the phone, and character is one of the reasons I bought it.

I have a friend in the cell phone business (so he gets to try out lots of phones), he told me "Get a Nokia 920." He likes the Windows phone much better than an Android one.

I might just do that. Then again, I might wait, because I'm still not seeing the bleeding edge phones with Windows on them. This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest factors that has held Microsoft OS phones back from the beginning. After the Win 7 phones came out there were some nice phones released, but "nice" isn't what I want, and I think I speak for a lot of people - we want the best smart phone we can get, and if it's Android then most people will buy it because it's a better phone, OS is secondary.

I mean, of all the phones I've seen reviewed here, the Note II looks like the best fit for me - but I want a Windows phone, so where does that leave me?

Well the hardware is basically identical. The best hardware out right now is the S4 (or the A6) with S4 pro just barely on the horizon and Tegra 4 months away. Windows phone has that. A lot of the flagship windows phones have their own things too. HTC has an amplifier for sound, and a never been done 2.1? (or 2.0?) MP front facing wide camera. Nokia has an insane (and also never been done except by them) 8.7MP camera that is WAY ahead of other phones. And wireless charging.

But those innovations might not mean much to you depending on how much you use your phone. I'm interested in the 8X because I skype a lot, but the Lumia sounds nice because of Nokia's apps, as well as the charging (interesting) and the camera (insanely good). They're definitely innovative, but "best hardware" is subjective. The underlying SoC is the same, but some of the software/other parts of the hardware are really what makes the difference.Reply

I thought it was interesting that you say there was a lot of debate about removing the "unused space" on WP7's home screen, because as is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 5 seconds, that empty space allows you to see more items simultaneously than you can on WP8.

Of course, the smaller tile size means you can see more items on WP8, but WP7 layout + WP8 smaller tiles size would maximize information density. The symmetry must be purely for marketing as seemed to be implied. Too bad. Less distinctive and less functional.Reply

Also less intuitive. There is no arrow to tell new Windows Phone users that more is to be had with a swipe to the left (or a tap on said arrow). If they wanted to better utilize that black space, they could have added charms for such items as search or settings, things that would actually get used often enough to warrant such a position.

I do not like the new Start Screen at all, let alone the overall lack of change to the UI. Too many missed opportunities.Reply

In that case, I stand corrected on the "intuitive" part regarding the home screen.

Still, I feel it lacks the character of the original.

Having put some more thought into it from the last post, I feel like a better use of the black area would have been charms representing programs running in the background...almost like the jump-lists from desktop Windows 7. Inside of an application, dragging the ellipsis would not only bring up the host of options, but the side bar as well.

Larger tiles just seems like a wasted opportunity. Almost lazily so.Reply

The standard 1x1 tile in WP8 is larger than the standard 1x1 tile in WP7. Same goes for the 2x1. To make it worse, they didn't scale the icons inside of the tiles appropriately so now there is more unused blank space. To me, it looks off.

The functions they added are better, I'm not denying that. However, I think they missed an opportunity for real improvement in the UI. They have also wasted more space with all of that background tile than they did with WP7.Reply

I'm all for a compact phone that uses a 4.3" high resolution screen, but the 8X is not it. The dimensions are similar to the Galaxy S3, but the S3 has 25% larger screen area. Very strange design choice.Reply

I may have missed this, but is there any support for Google apps at all? Most of my content is tied up in gmail, GDrive, calendar, etc. Will I have to start over and use only MS products to use this phone and OS?Reply

In a moment of temporary insanity I went from an SG2 to the Nokia W7P. In hindsight the app support is just not there. Feature wise the '7 phone was a major letdown. -Don't make the mistake for a second that Android is a baseline of features. W7P was way behind on features I had learned to take for granted.

I think the "metro" interface has some noteworthy features. It;s far better than the outdatesd, over simplistic IOS. If it had app support closer to Android it would have been a contender.

Obviously I can't speak for W8P but I would look it over very carefully before you commit. Reply

Now I'm even more excited. Been trying to get a Note 2 since release but reluctant to pay the high price for it. Maybe that was a good thing until WP8 phones come around. I like the design of the phone.Reply

Im always a bit baffled when i see the battery life chart when you compare phones. The rest of the internet seems to agree that the Galaxy S3 has much better battery life than the One X, and that this is a big dissadvantage for the One X, but not in your reviews, why is that?Reply

Just to show I have no inbuilt bias, I currently own a Lumia 800, Nexus 7 / iPod Touch and Windows 8 & Linux PCs, in the past I've used OS X.

A dual-core S4 (good) / Adreno 225 (Average) / RAM - 1 GB (ok) 512 MB (not good enough) These specs are just about passable for a head-end phone, but the quad-core S4 Pro with Adreno 320 is a big improvement, the A6 is excellent. ARM A15 SoC like the Exynos 5250 are already on the market, although not in a phone, Tegra 4 and Exynos 5450 will launch in Q1 to Q2 2013 and will destroy a regular S4.

People may argue that WP8 is smooth, big woof so was WP7, and so is iOS and thanks to Jelly Bean so is Android. When it comes to gaming, web browsing, apart from Sunspider (cough cheat) WP8 will age quickly. There are already reports that page loading and general app opening times are more sluggish than iPhone 5 / high-end Android, which Windows Phone like to hide with transition animations, which can irk after a while.

Will all my above comments be rendered mute by a yearly Hardware update cadence? That is the big question, if not WP8 will fail to offer the high-end attractions its rival platforms will offer, such as cutting edge games / 1080p video at 60 FPS etc because of lower spec hardware.Reply

One of the biggest differences between WP7 and WP8, though, is that Microsoft built an upgrade path into the latter. WP7 was basically locked onto the launch hardware. From what I understand, WP8 can be scaled to up to 64 cores, and supports resolutions greater than 720p. I'm sure GPU and RAM improvements will be included.Reply

"People may argue that WP8 is smooth, big woof so was WP7, and so is iOS and thanks to Jelly Bean so is Android. When it comes to gaming, web browsing, apart from Sunspider (cough cheat) WP8 will age quickly."

Do you only know how to read numbers, not words? Did you see the part of the review where he mentions how hardware support will be much broader for WP8? It has support for up to 64 cores. It won't age any more quickly than Android or iOS.Reply

Since it's becoming very apparent that some browsers optimize around certain browser tests, wouldn't it be better to just have page load speed comparison benchmarks with a few well known websites, or an aggregate of a few? Reply

My biggest problem with the HTC 8X is that pokey amount of included storage. I'm quite eager to try the WP8 OS, it really does look nice to use and a change from iOS, but the lack of storage totally kills it for me.

Having 64GB on my iPhone 4S and now 5 isn't something I could give up, my phone is simply too full. I have probably 5GB of free space after music and video.

If these phones offered microSD slots that you could slip a 64GB card in, I'd consider them, but at 16GB (with a noticeable chunk taken for the OS), no thanks.Reply

I don't know... the plastic case, and the bright colors... get to me, and not in a good way. I just compared this to the HTC Droid DNA and the DNA is more solid. But, I need something on AT&T's 4GLTE. I am in the U.S. (New York) and need speed, most of all, for sending large graphics files.Reply

I’ve got this on AT&T at home in Atlanta and as a graphic artist the 4GLTe speed is almost mandatory for sending large files or surfing the Web for ideas. I imagine it might be the same for architects, mechanical or aerospace engineers, or anyone else who deals frequently with visuals.Reply